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I wanted to make a reference to radeon-hd in another forum today because it reminded me, I wanted to refer to that, to show some Ubuntu fanboys, that its not about ubuntu-hatred but a normal thing allways happen if something tries something stupid.

Ok the 2 things are not 100% comparable, but it did make sense to support only 1 driver for 1 hardware. everything else is in the long run just retarded like hell. you can argue that radeonhd was the better solution, possible but then radoen would had to die.

And here we have another similarity, radeon-hd was pretty much a novell exclusive job, and they had exclusive access to hardware-documentation. So it would have given novell that got much money from microsoft at this days much power. So of course thats a big part why they did loose the "race".

But at least they had some technical reasons for their branch. they wanted do some stuff differently. while there is no known reason for mir except ubuntu has control over it.

But like ubuntu now its free software, or open source at least, each retard can make a account on github canoncial evne have their own github... so... wtf? how can canonical think that some other companies pay money to support this ubuntu-only technolegy who is now clear will never become a part of any other distribution?

Its not about politics but find best solutions, and I also cannot go to ubuntu and say hei, I want to make something similar to x-server can you make me a patch for your x-driver? they would direktly delete my mail-question and put me on a bannlist.

And btw, where was this flamewar when they anounced that they want not support gallium (at least not for now maybe in the future). they do what they think is in their interest, its opensource everybody can include their stack or not, but you cant demand them to support your stuff for free.

the funniest part is, that the people that are nvidia fanboys, and have no problem with nvidia dont support any opensource efforts are now shurely often that people that find it totaly not ok from intel to support this one opensource solution, I mean nvidia does not support gallium as example, its not even clear if it will be possible to run nvidia blob with wayland, or lets take the randr support... intel does not hinder you to patch whatever you want into their driver so if you are a nvidia fanboy please dont even start to flame here against intel.

I wanted to make a reference to radeon-hd in another forum today because it reminded me, I wanted to refer to that, to show some Ubuntu fanboys, that its not about ubuntu-hatred but a normal thing allways happen if something tries something stupid.

Ok the 2 things are not 100% comparable, but it did make sense to support only 1 driver for 1 hardware. everything else is in the long run just retarded like hell. you can argue that radeonhd was the better solution, possible but then radoen would had to die.

And here we have another similarity, radeon-hd was pretty much a novell exclusive job, and they had exclusive access to hardware-documentation. So it would have given novell that got much money from microsoft at this days much power. So of course thats a big part why they did loose the "race".

But at least they had some technical reasons for their branch. they wanted do some stuff differently.

Oh wow.

RadeonHD supported R500 and up (where the display engine got _completely_ changed), and our plan was to have Radeon support R100 through rs480 (and do it well and finally stabilize). There was a very clear division there, one that made perfect technical and practical sense.

RadeonHD made sure that HW documentation went out. We never did accept documentation from ATI (and it was ATI which was forced to provide this documentation, AMD had no access itself - and this is why we only got limited documentation), which we were not assured would go out. Mr Bridgman from ATI has broken that promise on several docs that i still have in my possession. The free docs dried up the second RadeonHD died, ATI never wanted to produce these, and you all just got docs _because_ of radeonHD. If anyone had exclusive access to documentation, then it was the Radeon project. We repeatedly caught ATIs Mr Bridgman providing information and documentation to the other project first, before talking to AMDs partner.

And finally, RadeonHD was a SuSE project, with half the developer time paid by AMD and the other half provided by SuSE, to ensure that there would be a technical solution which suits both parties. Novell was happy to take some of the marketing noise (and the money, to strangely redistribute it over the company), but that was about it.

RadeonHD supported R500 and up (where the display engine got _completely_ changed), and our plan was to have Radeon support R100 through rs480 (and do it well and finally stabilize). There was a very clear division there, one that made perfect technical and practical sense.

RadeonHD made sure that HW documentation went out. We never did accept documentation from ATI (and it was ATI which was forced to provide this documentation, AMD had no access itself - and this is why we only got limited documentation), which we were not assured would go out. Mr Bridgman from ATI has broken that promise on several docs that i still have in my possession. The free docs dried up the second RadeonHD died, ATI never wanted to produce these, and you all just got docs _because_ of radeonHD. If anyone had exclusive access to documentation, then it was the Radeon project. We repeatedly caught ATIs Mr Bridgman providing information and documentation to the other project first, before talking to AMDs partner.

And finally, RadeonHD was a SuSE project, with half the developer time paid by AMD and the other half provided by SuSE, to ensure that there would be a technical solution which suits both parties. Novell was happy to take some of the marketing noise (and the money, to strangely redistribute it over the company), but that was about it.

Hold on here, How is it that you can blame your decisions on someone else? It was you that decided you didnt want to use Atombios, it was your decision to bang modesetting hardware directly. That had nothing to do with anyone else. If you want to place blame, then place it where it belongs. (You had all the documentation you needed, you just wanted documentation that was unreasonable to expect to get.)

You chose to implement a development model that wasnt supportable. The reason that radeon surpassed radeonhd was because other developers could implement support for functionality and features that would have been far more difficult to do on radeonhd because of the choices you made.

EDIT: I remember it clearly. It was mid 2007, radeonhd was still working on getting basic mode setting working and radeon implemented Atombios and supported more hardware than radeonhd instantly. There was no chance at all that you could provide the same level of support doing what you were doing. Additionally radeon was able to leverage work done for older generations to get a jump start for r600, which wasnt even a possibility on radeonhd. And radeon had more developers contributing to it.

"So what if Canonical has decided to reinvent Wayland? Apart from the weird contribution agreement (which will only limit contributions), Mir is fully free software isn't it? Who are they hurting apart from their own resources and their own users? It's not that I am applauding Canonical for their decision, but I really don't see the massive problem here." Why is Canonical not allowed to do this?"

that's more than 2 lines.

Am I missing something?

a lot it seems...

Who has ever said that Canonical isn't allowed to build their own dispaly server?

many

The point is that they'll have to do it on their own

arn't they? sure they use also some other code... open source code allowed to be used for that. so do others, also wayland.

and can't force anyone to support them.

am I missing something?

If I come up with something why should I demand other people do do my homework?

hmm, i think i am missng something, beside the fact, that your statement sounds sooooo VERY differnt to the complains i read about canonical regarding mir.

This guy obviously has no overview of the situation.

how you can judge if you have read only two lines?
beside of that it seems you have no overview, neither of that guys post nor of mir vs wayland drama.

p.s.
"... then I read this article. It is a who's who of reinventers, complaining about Canonical reinventing Wayland"

quite true.

p.p.s. you should really read his post. he is NOT defending canonical.

And finally, RadeonHD was a SuSE project, with half the developer time paid by AMD and the other half provided by SuSE, to ensure that there would be a technical solution which suits both parties. Novell was happy to take some of the marketing noise (and the money, to strangely redistribute it over the company), but that was about it.

like I said, it makes no sence to support 2 drivers for 1 hardware in the long run, especialy of grafics drivers because they are extremly complex. So I did understand that xorg didnt want to deliver 2 and confuse the users. Maybe the communication in this time wasnt good, I cant say much about that.

But I also said that you seem to at least had a reason to do it, which you made clear at that time. Ubuntu cant even say a real reason except they want to have control over it as reason.

And what hindered you to load that driver on github and then develop some features radeon did not have, and if you would have more features or more speed or whatever over a year or so... I am shure you would have someday replaced radeon. opensource is a bit like evolution, the better stuff most of the time survices and or that who more organisms cooperate.

But putting that fact aside for the moment, is it pretty much certain now that there will be no -- zero, zip, nada -- Mir support in Intel drivers? Because it's going to be hard to jive the idea of not accepting an XMir patch on the basis of Intel "not condoning the actions of Canonical [by creating Mir]", and then separately providing support for Mir.

Well, not condoning such actions might involve just XMir, if the action not condoned is using a compatibility layer for running the desktop. And that's as far as the ambiguity goes. It's likely that it refers to Mir as a whole, though.

Also, there will be support, but until Intel says so, this support will be downstream, provided by Canonical.

Hold on here, How is it that you can blame your decisions on someone else? It was you that decided you didnt want to use Atombios, it was your decision to bang modesetting hardware directly. That had nothing to do with anyone else. If you want to place blame, then place it where it belongs. (You had all the documentation you needed, you just wanted documentation that was unreasonable to expect to get.)

We had _a_ _lot_ of documentation for some things. We never got answers on the tough questions (spread spectrum, power management, bios re-reading after first driver start, tv-out, ...), or if we did, we got bogus information (The PLL wall: "why don't you run into the wall from another angle?"). AtomBIOS provided us quickly with the information we needed which was not documented in the register docs that everyone got, and it was quick and easy to implement those bits in C. All the bits of information which were not readily provided by the register docs, and which were not explained by AtomBIOS either, they really ate our time. And we would have to spend an hour every thursday listening why we didn't get an answer on this.

Originally Posted by duby229

You chose to implement a development model that wasnt supportable. The reason that radeon surpassed radeonhd was because other developers could implement support for functionality and features that would have been far more difficult to do on radeonhd because of the choices you made.

Did you know that ATI tried to block the release of RadeonHD by not allowing us to properly license the atombios interpreter code? Did you know that, because we only had limited dependence on atombios (we could make do with int10 booting and a manual description of the board layout), we stated: "fine, we ship without atombios then". This is why any code went out to begin with.

Are you aware of what happened internally at AMD? Redhat was really unhappy at SuSE getting the scoop with radeonHD (hey, they should've helped AMD with the Hammer, but instead they couldn't be arsed) In Oktober 2007, the AMD account manager responsible for SuSE got moved aside, and the account manager responsible for Red Hat (Ted Donnely) took over this role. This is when the whole thing derailled. Mr Bridgman suddenly was free to play any games he liked, and he started supporting the competing project. In the end though, he played everyone against each other, making sure that fglrx survived as is.

Did you also know that the endless corporate politics had forced us to implement more complete atombios dependence? Egbert was hard at work thoroughly designing and testing this. And then RV670 came round, and egbert, during the work on full atombios dependence, added 12 lines to the C code and had the hw work beautifully. Mr Bridgman was not happy with that.

AtomBIOS was never the real issue, although it was not accepted by ATI politically. As soon as egbert added atombios dependent modesetting, the next stick to bash us with was found.

Originally Posted by duby229

EDIT: I remember it clearly. It was mid 2007, radeonhd was still working on getting basic mode setting working and radeon implemented Atombios and supported more hardware than radeonhd instantly. There was no chance at all that you could provide the same level of support doing what you were doing. Additionally radeon was able to leverage work done for older generations to get a jump start for r600, which wasnt even a possibility on radeonhd. And radeon had more developers contributing to it.

You seem to have your dates off. RadeonHD was released september 2007. Radeon forked the radeonhd code late november 2007.

Yes, we were spending a lot of time on modesetting at radeonHD. Not on the atombios bits, but on the hard parts which no-one was able to tell us. Due to our extremely clean and transparent code, it was very easy to take the hard bits and use them with atombios and then calling it ones own code. And this is part of what made radeonhd seem slow. We were doing the hard bits and making none of the big noisy statements.

Also, can you imagine the flack i would've gotten from the likes of airlied, ajax and daniels, if i, in 2007, had chosen to support atombios extensively? Intel only just dropped BIOS dependence. This would not have improved things in the radeonhd versus radeon battle either, as then radeon would've gone the proper C code way. It's not as if ATI would've been more supportive of us then, as ATI already was out to kill us after we had forced things open. It was a Catch-22 all along, and i picked the technically and morally more acceptable route.

Radeon was playing with all sorts of things (r500 colourspace conversion, tv-out -- can you tell me what happened to the tv-out code btw? -- or was that really a case of airlied loudly shouting "it worked on my machine once! Absolute victory over radeonhd!!!!!"), and playing is the right word for it, while happily taking the hard modesetting bits we at radeonhd had solved.

R600 modesetting was supported from the get-go on radeonhd. Matthias Hopf brought up the first triangle late 2008, with loads of conflicting information coming from ATI, in the end it was pure manual labour. Without a triangle on the R6xx, there was also none of these things like 3d engine colour space conversion or 2d acceleration.

What really hurt us at radeonhd was my absolute resolve to create the best code possible and to have things tested as well as possible. RadeonHD bitbanging code was made for eternity and was written in such a way that it could have lived through any infrastructure change possible. Code versus noise always has noise win, but this was not what killed us.

The real killer was AMD losing grip over ATI, and with time it was less and less able to support us. With code and docs public already, ATI could not afford to go back on that completely, but they could limit the fglrx damage and documentation overhead, and that's exactly what they did.

We had _a_ _lot_ of documentation for some things. We never got answers on the tough questions (spread spectrum, power management, bios re-reading after first driver start, tv-out, ...), or if we did, we got bogus information (The PLL wall: "why don't you run into the wall from another angle?"). AtomBIOS provided us quickly with the information we needed which was not documented in the register docs that everyone got, and it was quick and easy to implement those bits in C. All the bits of information which were not readily provided by the register docs, and which were not explained by AtomBIOS either, they really ate our time. And we would have to spend an hour every thursday listening why we didn't get an answer on this.

Did you know that ATI tried to block the release of RadeonHD by not allowing us to properly license the atombios interpreter code? Did you know that, because we only had limited dependence on atombios (we could make do with int10 booting and a manual description of the board layout), we stated: "fine, we ship without atombios then". This is why any code went out to begin with.

Are you aware of what happened internally at AMD? Redhat was really unhappy at SuSE getting the scoop with radeonHD (hey, they should've helped AMD with the Hammer, but instead they couldn't be arsed) In Oktober 2007, the AMD account manager responsible for SuSE got moved aside, and the account manager responsible for Red Hat (Ted Donnely) took over this role. This is when the whole thing derailled. Mr Bridgman suddenly was free to play any games he liked, and he started supporting the competing project. In the end though, he played everyone against each other, making sure that fglrx survived as is.

Did you also know that the endless corporate politics had forced us to implement more complete atombios dependence? Egbert was hard at work thoroughly designing and testing this. And then RV670 came round, and egbert, during the work on full atombios dependence, added 12 lines to the C code and had the hw work beautifully. Mr Bridgman was not happy with that.

AtomBIOS was never the real issue, although it was not accepted by ATI politically. As soon as egbert added atombios dependent modesetting, the next stick to bash us with was found.

You seem to have your dates off. RadeonHD was released september 2007. Radeon forked the radeonhd code late november 2007.

Yes, we were spending a lot of time on modesetting at radeonHD. Not on the atombios bits, but on the hard parts which no-one was able to tell us. Due to our extremely clean and transparent code, it was very easy to take the hard bits and use them with atombios and then calling it ones own code. And this is part of what made radeonhd seem slow. We were doing the hard bits and making none of the big noisy statements.

Also, can you imagine the flack i would've gotten from the likes of airlied, ajax and daniels, if i, in 2007, had chosen to support atombios extensively? Intel only just dropped BIOS dependence. This would not have improved things in the radeonhd versus radeon battle either, as then radeon would've gone the proper C code way. It's not as if ATI would've been more supportive of us then, as ATI already was out to kill us after we had forced things open. It was a Catch-22 all along, and i picked the technically and morally more acceptable route.

Radeon was playing with all sorts of things (r500 colourspace conversion, tv-out -- can you tell me what happened to the tv-out code btw? -- or was that really a case of airlied loudly shouting "it worked on my machine once! Absolute victory over radeonhd!!!!!"), and playing is the right word for it, while happily taking the hard modesetting bits we at radeonhd had solved.

R600 modesetting was supported from the get-go on radeonhd. Matthias Hopf brought up the first triangle late 2008, with loads of conflicting information coming from ATI, in the end it was pure manual labour. Without a triangle on the R6xx, there was also none of these things like 3d engine colour space conversion or 2d acceleration.

What really hurt us at radeonhd was my absolute resolve to create the best code possible and to have things tested as well as possible. RadeonHD bitbanging code was made for eternity and was written in such a way that it could have lived through any infrastructure change possible. Code versus noise always has noise win, but this was not what killed us.

The real killer was AMD losing grip over ATI, and with time it was less and less able to support us. With code and docs public already, ATI could not afford to go back on that completely, but they could limit the fglrx damage and documentation overhead, and that's exactly what they did.

The real killer was AMD losing grip over ATI, and with time it was less and less able to support us. With code and docs public already, ATI could not afford to go back on that completely, but they could limit the fglrx damage and documentation overhead, and that's exactly what they did.

I dont really know the tech details, and maybe radeonhd was better than radeon, for user experince it made no big difference which one u used. that matters for users. Another thing was that suse was bought by microsoft (yes thats not 100% true but not 100% false thats the problem). you cant accept money from the devil for promoting their os, and having linux patents and hope that you get love from the linux community. if there were over that additional intriges maybe not nice cant say much about that.

But what I dont understand is why you all tell about ati and amd, was it amd or ati, there was a date xy where amd bought ati, after this time ati in juristic way didnt exist anymore. And I remember clearly that at least official there was 0 opensource commitment except the old r300 driver from ati before amd bought them. So how does ati matter with the radeonhd driver? they did not exist anymore (blessed god the day amd bought this bastard-microsoft-nsa-sponsored-company ati).

And another thing even when you are right, and radeonhd should have succeded and it had nothing to do with the microsoft-bribes and other stuff I would agree that you dont want such a company with power over such import software-part, how does that then relate to the mir shit, mir is clearly nothing better than wayland so maybe at this time radeonhd should have be the winner because it was better AND because it was earlier there... so wayland is better and earlier their so why should somebody pay developers to support this garbage other than canonical itself?